Third World Quarterly, Vol 24, No 3, pp 545–562, 2003

Islam and the West in world history

SHAHROUGH AKHAVI

ABSTRACT Rejecting the thesis that Islam and the West are on a collision
course, this article examines the nature of their relations over the centuries and
concludes that, although convergence between them is not likely, grounds for
mutual tolerance and co-existence have always existed and can, in future, exist.
Understanding that proprietary liberalism is not the only model for democracy is
a necessary first step in the assessment of the long-term prospects for stable
relations between Islam and the West. In this article intellectual, social, economic
and political trends are examined, the causes of tensions and conflicts between
the two sides are analysed, the nature of the contemporary Islamist project is
identified, and the possibilities for effective dialogue between mainstream
tendencies in both the West and the Muslim world are assessed.

By the early 21st century many have concluded that Islam and Muslims are
hostile to Western perspectives, practices and institutions. Apart from the
lurid and hyperbolic writings generated by some Christian evangelicals, Jewish
fundamentalists and even scholars,1 the 1990s witnessed an influential academic
theory alleging an inevitable clash between Muslim and Western civilisations,2
whose author provides anecdotal evidence to ‘prove’ this thesis.
Although this is not the place to debate Huntington’s argument,3 raising it
allows one to ask how Muslims have viewed and will probably view the West in
the context of world history. This is an extremely complicated question, because
‘Islam’ and ‘the West’ are such abstract concepts, and one must not reify them.
Both entail such varied traditions and experiences that one cannot regard them as
monistic units of analysis. Accordingly, although I will try to highlight the broad
outlines of Muslim–Western encounters, readers should know of differences in
Muslims’ reaction to that West. True, Muslims see the world largely in terms of
their own internal processes. Yet their vision has been significantly influenced by
their experiences with the West.
The point of departure for Muslims is trying to understand their world is their
faith. The dictionary states that religion means ‘action or conduct indicating a
belief in, reverence for, and desire to please a divine ruling power; the exercise or
practice of rites implying this’; ‘recognition on the part of man of some higher
unseen power as having control of his destiny, and as being entitled to obedience,
reverence, and worship; the general mental and moral attitude resulting from this
belief, with its reference to its effect on the individual or community’.4 Muslims
specifically add to these general points that they must materialise God’s
Shahrough Akhavi is in the Department of Government and International Studies, University of South
Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208-0001, USA. E-mail: akhavi@sc.edu.

ISSN 0143-6597 print/ISSN 1360-2241 online/03/030545-18  2003 Third World Quarterly

DOI: 10.1080/0143659032000084465 545
 SHAHROUGH AKHAVI

commands as members of a living community. The interest of this community

must be fostered, promoted and defended. Failing in this risks the lapse of the
religious injunctions.
True, many Muslims compartmentalise their lives so as to keep religion in a
purely private sphere and behave in the external world on the basis of non-
religious criteria. Or, if they allow matters of religion to intrude into public
arenas, they limit them to purely moral and pietistic concerns that bear not on
social policy and politics but on ethical devotions—such as affirming the unity of
God and Muhammad’s prophecy, congregational prayer, fasting during the month
of Ramadan, pilgrimage to Mecca, and paying poor dues. For them, observing
these is sufficient warrant to claim that they have materialised God’s commands
as members of a community. For present purposes I will label this orientation the
‘minimalist view’.
For other Muslims, however, this compartmentalisation is risky at best and, at
worst, an abandonment of the categorial imperatives of the faith. In their view the
materialisation of God’s commands in their daily lives cannot be accomplished
unless they construct the requisite economic, political, and social institutions. For
them, Islam is both ‘religion and politics’.5 I will refer to this orientation as the
‘maximalist view’.6
Consider also that Islam is a highly legalistic religion. Islam is a communi-
tarian system of ordinances and Muslims do not understand Christian tenets such
as ‘render unto God that which is God’s and unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s’,
or ‘the Kingdom of God is within you’. The mainstream7 or Sunni interpretation
of Islam rejects this privatisation of faith, attaching overwhelming importance to
the charisma of the community as a basis for salvation.8 Further reinforcing the
legalistic aspects of Islam is the idea of the essentially inscrutable nature of God.
While some religions emphasise learning about God’s attributes, essence and
nature, Sunnism holds that God is ultimately unknowable, and so believers ought
instead to know and act in accordance with God’s law.9 This emphasis upon
law is so strong that we identify the Muslim clergy more as jurists, while we
recognise Christian clergymen more as theologians.
This does not mean that Islam disparages theology. Indeed, Muslim seminaries
teach scholastic theology, and no Muslim religious leader can claim to be learned
who has not demonstrated knowledge of this field, which primarily relates to
God’s characteristics and attributes (such as His unity and justice—though not
His essence). These topics are indispensable for the acquisition of religious
knowledge in Islam, not least because they also bear heavily on the human
being’s characteristics, including freedom, responsibility and autonomy.
Withal, theology pales in relationship to jurisprudence for Islam’s men of
religion (ulama), precisely because Muslim society requires experts in the law to
show believers what God wants them to do and how they may best fulfill such
desires.

Development of Islamic thought and early contacts with Western ideas

Significantly, the great translation movements of the ninth and 10th centuries,
focusing on Greek, Syriac, Persian and Indian writings, and centred in the school
546
 ISLAM AND THE WEST IN WORLD HISTORY

of Baghdad, focused on works of philosophy and, to some extent, theology, but

not on the law. For Muslims believe that non-Islamic societies have least to teach
them in that realm.
The Muslims had great need for translations of Greek and Latin works in
theology and philosophy but for somewhat different reasons. In theology, they
required concepts rather than any particular substantive arguments based on
them. Encounters with Christians, moreover, provided opportunities for early
Muslim theologians to sharpen their ideas in their disputes with one another.10 By
the time of the first wave of translations in the ninth century, Muslim scholastic
theologians had crystallised their notions and actually did not borrow much from
non-Muslim works that had been translated into Arabic. In contrast, Muslim
philosophers relied heavily on translations from the Greek for the development of
their ideas and arguments. They read widely and deeply in Platonic and neo-
Platonic philosophy and regarded Aristotle as their most important influence.
Islamic mysticism, or gnosis, also valued Greek idealist philosophy.
In its first 10 years (622–632) the Islamic community was ruled by the Prophet,
who acted as both the religious and temporal leader of the Muslims. His early
successors continued as this, but gradually the two spheres came to be separated
in fact in the practice of Islamic rulers came to diverge from the high-minded
ideals of the faith. However, the theory continued to emphasise the integration of
the two spheres. This notion persists even into the early twenty-first century for
a variety of Islamist11 movements whose goal is to restitute the integration of
religion and politics that the exemplary model of the Prophet and his immediate
successors had achieved.
The actual separation of politics from religion in Islam dramatically influenced
the continuing development of the community. On the one side, the caliphs—the
successors of Muhammad—tried to guard their political power against regional
usurpers. Although they had abandoned such efforts by the mid-10th century and
retroactively ratified these usurpations by princes (known as the phenomenon of
amirate by seizure), by conferring upon these amirs diplomas of investiture,
the practice of the Prophet and early caliphs had become a model for groups
alienated by tyrannical or impious rulers. On the other side, the jurists accepted
the separation of religious and political spheres, holding that even oppressive
rulers were preferable to saintly ones if the latter were unable to avert existential
threats to the community. Yet many Muslims have problems with this kind of ex
post facto rationalisation.
A tradition attributed to the Prophet advises the believer to ‘Seek knowledge,
even unto China’. This reference to what at that time was perceived to be the
furthest reaches of the known world indicates that early Muslims were aware of
distant imperia. Western Arabia then was a busy place, athwart the trade routes
from Africa to the Levant. Jews and Christians disputed with Muslims, precipi-
tating a tradition of exigetical debate. Because the Romans ignored theoretical
matters and Greek thinkers residing in Roman territories were persecuted, they
migrated to Islamic areas where they, too, engaged in debates with the Muslims.
The religious trends of this time were suffused with Manichaean, Zoroastrian,
Buddhist, Hindu, Judaic, Christian and Muslim thought, and this resulted in a
remarkably rich cultural interaction.12
547
 SHAHROUGH AKHAVI

Muslims felt extremely confident in their debates with representatives of other

faiths. In fact, they believed that Judaism and Christianity, though embodying
many religious truths, were superseded religions on the grounds that Jews and
Christians had turned from God’s ordinances. Yet Muslims have generally
respected the Jewish and Christian scriptures as foundational texts for Islam and
thus consider Jews and Christians as ‘people of the book’, deserving protection.

Muslim theology and philosophy in interactions with the West

Muslim theology eventually crystallised into what may be termed an Islamic
central tendency. The key issues were the attributes of God, causality and pre-
determinism. The dominant view, called Ash’arism, held that the Qur’an was the
speech of God. Because God could not be limited in His actions, neither could
His attributes, whence it was reasoned that the Qur’an was uncreated in historical
time or space because God was eternal. To hold otherwise was to place limits on
God. Ash’arite ontology held that the cosmos consisted of monads in constant
flux. The doctrine emphasised the contingency of occurrences and rejected causal
relationships in nature as a violation of God’s sovereign power and will.
Ash’arism addressed the problem of evil in the world by arguing that, although
God directed the occurrence of phenomena, He was not responsible for the
suffering produced by human beings. People, it was felt, ‘acquire’ their actions
from God at the moment of their action (permitting the denial of free will), but
God Himself takes no responsibility for the evil that people do (thereby it could
be maintained that evil in the world is actually the fault of humans). Finally, the
Ash’arites maintained that a grave sinner was condemned to hell in advance and
that no dispensation could save him/her.
The opposing minority view, known as Mu’tazilism, maintained that God had
only one indivisible essence and no separate attributes, such as hearing, sight,
speech. The Mu’tazilites interpreted Qur’anic references to these attributes
metaphorically and argued that referring to God’s speech as an eternal attribute
was to erect a hypostatisation that offended the doctrine of the absolute unicity of
God (tawhid). They argued that, although God was the sovereign creator of the
cosmos, He does not direct people to act in any particular manner. He gave
humans the freedom to determine their own conduct. They also upheld the idea
of God’s justice—that the Qur’anic threats of punishment in hell and rewards in
paradise were not adumbrated in some offhand manner. To the contrary, they
believed that people would face the consequences of their good or bad deeds but
felt that only God knew whether a grave sinner would be damned or not.13
Ash’arism prevailed over Mu’tazilism, even though the Caliph al-Ma’mun
(ruled 813–833) sought to make these latter doctrines the official thought of the
Muslim community as a way of ending the divisions in Islamic theology. Later,
as the Mu’tazilite views became marginalised, especially as a result of the work
of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d 1111), it was left to Shi’ism to identify more closely
with the radical rationalism inherent in their positions. How the triumph
of Ash’arite over Mu’tazilite ontology and epistemology influenced the way
Muslims have perceived the West is not immediately apparent from the dis-
cussion so far. However, I will argue that ultimately Ash’arism’s dominance has
548
 ISLAM AND THE WEST IN WORLD HISTORY

induced Muslims to be sceptical of Western culture, especially in the post-

Cartesian period. It has also facilitated Western views of Muslims and Islam
as fatalistic and indolent—views that I believe are highly ahistorical and
tendentious.
Philosophy, too, was to become the subject of debate by Muslims, Jews,
Christians and others in the early centuries of Islam. Mainstream Muslims are
wary of philosophy because its intellectual point of departure is not revelational
but rather deductive and empirical. Of course, the great Muslim philosophers
accepted Islamic revelation and, indeed, believed that Islam itself could better be
understood and reaffirmed through discursive and inductive reasoning. Never-
theless, neither the Sunni nor even Shi’i clergy have ever generally accepted such
claims. The rise of Islamic philosophy itself from scientific works translated into
Arabic from a variety of ancient Greek, Sanskrit and Old Persian texts that
considerably antedated Islamic revelation was itself a reason for the clergy’s
mistrust of Muslim philosophers and their science.
The first great Muslim philosopher, al-Kindi (d ca 870), flourished at a time
when Mu’tazilism was in vogue. He was conversant with Aristotelian and
Platonic philosophy, albeit his knowledge was deficient. He declared that the
knowledge God gave to the prophets was also attainable by ordinary human
beings, although it might be less complete and perfect. He felt lay persons should
be able to study reality and its relationship to the world of forms, with Plato
regarding the world of corporeal beings as transitory and attributing enduring
reality to those forms which could be known by the senses, by mathematics and
logic. Al-Kindi influenced Jewish philosophy, especially the North African neo-
Platonist Isaac Ben Solomon Israeli (d ca 940).
In fact, Jewish philosophers who lived under Muslim rule wrote in Arabic and
easily interacted with Muslim philosophers. Although non-Muslims knew
al-Kindi, even more influential among them was perhaps the greatest of the
Muslim philosophers, al-Farabi (d 960). He applied the thought of the ancient
Greeks to the problems of order and instability in Muslim life. Elevating reason
above revelation, al-Farabi noted that ordinary people benefit from the truth that
religion generates through the use of religious symbols. However, pure truth,
unmediated by religious symbols, is within the grasp of the philosopher. Standing
in relation to the state as does God to the universe, the philosopher is the
benefactor of the Muslim community. While his perspective did not endear
al-Farabi to the Muslim theologians and jurists, it propelled him into the forefront
of thinkers for whom a science of politics was necessary. Al-Farabi’s utopia was
the ‘perfect city’ (al-madina al-fadila), headed by the philosopher. This utopia is
not so much the community of believers but a body of citizens deriving their
happiness from their membership in it. As the ancient Greeks believed that no
person could maximise his potential outside the polis, al-Farabi emphasised that
no Muslim could do so outside the perfect city.
Other Islamic philosophers, especially ibn Rushd (Averroes, d 1198) also
significantly influenced both Jewish and Christian thinkers. 14 He wrote that
Islamic revelation was God’s gift to human beings to ensure their enlightenment
and prosperity. Accordingly, it was seemly for Muslims to implement the basic
rituals associated with that revelation as a sign of respect for and submission to
549
 SHAHROUGH AKHAVI

God. However, he argued that human beings also had the God-ordained duty to
seek the truth. Normal individuals could acquire a modicum of knowledge and
understanding, but specially endowed individuals were capable of achieving
superior knowledge, the knowledge of philosophy. Theologians, he believed,
were not competent to undertake scientific inquiry.
Ibn Rushd attacked al-Ghazali’s book, The Incoherence of the Philosophers, an
attempt to synthesise mainstream (Ash’arite) theological views and Sufism.
Entitling his own work The Incoherence of the Incoherence, ibn Rushd wrote that
al-Ghazali misunderstood philosophical discourse and misused its concepts in an
unsuccessful effort to demolish their arguments. Ibn Rushd broadened his
criticisms by saying that theologians and mystics lacked knowledge of scientific
methodology and discursive logic and so must stop trying to control philo-
sophical research. His remarkable attack was made the more compelling because
of his own stature as a jurist with a profound knowledge of Islamic law. The
greatest philosopher of the Western realms of Islam, his works were translated
into Hebrew and Latin and were read by St Thomas Aquinas (d 1274). It has
even been stated that ibn Rushd’s impact on Jewish philosophy rivaled and
perhaps surpassed that of the great Jewish thinker, Maimonides (d 1204).15

Decline of Islam and its impact on relations with the West

Although the decline of a civilisation is difficult to date exactly, for the caliphate
the consensus is that it began after the 10th century. By then the four major
schools of Sunni law were established, the territorial reach of the community had
extended its furthest, and the authority of the caliph had been challenged by the
leaders of Turkic tribes migrating from Central Asia into the heartland of the
Middle East. They converted to Islam but represented major threats to the
centre as they seized power in various districts of the caliphate. In exchange for
recognition of their status, the chiefs agreed to allow the invocation of the
caliphs’ names in the mosques, and also to use coinage bearing the names of
ruling caliphs. The constitutional jurists produced a theory of the caliphate that
maintained the legitimacy of these arrangements, thereby justifying under the
‘doctrine of necessity’ effective loss of power by the caliphs to warlords.
In 1258 the Mongols destroyed Baghdad, seat of the caliphate. Meanwhile,
Crusaders had invaded the Muslim heartland in a series of campaigns between
1095 and 1291, intending to remove Muslim rule from the ‘Holy Land’.
Although they failed to entrench Christian power there, even their temporary
successes in establishing Latin enclaves in the region distressed the Muslims.
Interestingly, however, they regarded the Crusaders less as the representatives of
Christendom than as hordes of barbaric Franks who dared to threaten the abode
of Islam.
Muslim forces, led by the Kurd, Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi (Saladin, d 1193)
routed the Crusaders from Jerusalem, assisted in this by internecine intra-
Christian fighting during which they sacked Constantinople itself. At the time
Muslims regarded the invaders as a serious challenge, but they did not believe
they were a Christian force representing Europe. This was partly because
Muslims had permitted Christians (and Jews) to live among themselves and
550
 ISLAM AND THE WEST IN WORLD HISTORY

believed that the local Christian leaders effectively represented Christianity.

Thus, it was left to later generations, mainly after Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt
in 1798, retroactively to perceive in the Crusader forces an example of Christian
European civilisation’s efforts to destroy Islam.16
In the face of the threats posed to Muslim institutions by the Turkic tribes, the
Mongols and the Crusaders, the ulama became increasingly defensive and
promoted emulation of the ideas of previous generations as a way to protect the
faith. This imitative reaction formation was to reinforce even further the bias of
Ash’arism against rationalism, innovation and reform. Although Muslim thinkers
such as ibn Taymiyya (d 1328) and ibn Khaldun (d 1406) would occasionally
criticise the decline of Islam these were basically lone voices.17 Islamic thought
entered a long period of stagnation that was to last until the 19th century.
Meanwhile, European scholars began to abandon their earlier fascination with
the ideas of the great Muslim philosophers. Although ibn Rushd was very much
in vogue in European universities toward the end of the 13th century, his ideas
soon came under attack. Eventually, intellectuals such as Albertus Magnus
(d 1280) and Thomas Aquinas—both of whom studied and taught at the
University of Paris—and Dante (d 1321) began to attack Arab philosophy and
Islamic theology. Magnus defended the doctrine of the soul’s immortality against
the European followers of ibn Rushd, who maintained, with the master himself,
that a single intellect common to all human being is all that remains after death.
Aquinas, a student of Magnus, rejected ibn Rushd’s thesis that revelation and
reason produced two truths that can finally contradict one another. Dante placed
Islam’s Prophet, Muhammad, in hell in his master work, The Divine Comedy, as
‘a disseminator of scandal and schism’.18

Islam and the West in the early modern period

Military conflicts between ‘Islam’ and ‘Christendom’ between the end of the
Crusades and the fall of Constantinople (1291–1453) were limited to the contest
between the Ottomans and the Byzantine Empire and the battles leading to the
final ejection of Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula by the late 15th century.19
Europe ignored the Ottomans in the early years of the dynasty (1312–1453), but
this changed after the latter conquered Constantinople. Between 1453 and 1683
the Ottomans were a formidable threat to Austria, Hungary and Russia. However,
relations between the Ottomans and Europeans in this period were by no means
uniformly hostile. Indeed, the Ottoman sultans were highly pragmatic and signed
many agreements with European rulers.20
Western ideas during the period of Ottoman ascendency rarely influenced
Muslim society. Indeed, the printing press, critical for the diffusion of such ideas
in the West itself after the mid-15th century, was not even introduced in the
Empire until 1721.21 The powerful states of Islam were the Ottoman Empire
(1312–1923), Safavid Iran (1501–1722) and the Mughal Empire (1526–1721)
centred in India. The Ottomans besieged Vienna on two different occasions, in
1529 and 1683 during the peak years of their power. Meanwhile, the sultans
deigned to permit merchants and diplomats to come to the Sublime Porte (as
the imperial palace was called) and even magnanimously granted them certain
551
 SHAHROUGH AKHAVI

privileges and signed various agreements with them. During the mercantilist era
(16th–18th centuries) Muslims were unaware of the momentous consequences
for them of developments in lands far away. As precious metals were brought
back from the New World by explorers, the circulation in Ottoman domains of
European specie containing the new metals caused the debasement of Ottoman
coins and an inflationary spiral. Also, voyages of discovery enabled shipping to
circumvent the traditional land trade routes that went through Muslim territories.
This sharply reduced the export trade and tax revenues on imports. The double
economic impact—fiscal and commercial—of these trends was devastating for
the Empire.
Beginning with the second siege of Vienna in 1683, the Empire entered into a
long period of decline and European domination that ended only in 1923. The
theoretical and actual separation of church and state in the West, sparked by the
Cartesian epistemological revolution, greatly influenced the West’s ascendency.
Without the triumph of Cartesian radical rationalism, the disembedding of church
and state and the scientific and industrial revolutions could probably not have
occurred. It is, of course, highly symptomatic that by the time of empiricist and
rationalist thinkers such as Francis Bacon (1561–1626), René Descartes
(1596–1650) and Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716), European scholars had lost
their interest in Muslim philosophy.
In fact, Western writers now levelled polemical attacks on Muslim thought.
This trend actually went as far back as Peter the Venerable (d 1156), who reviled
the Prophet as an imposter. Later thinkers joined in, including the English
scientist, Roger Bacon (1220–1292), the French mathematician and philosopher,
Blaise Pascal (1623–1663), the iconoclastic Enlightenment thinker, François
Marie Arouet Voltaire (1694–1778),22 the French Encyclopedist, Denis Diderot
(1713–1784), the English historian, Edward Gibbon (1737–1794), the French
religious historian, Ernest Renan (1823–1892), the British Orientalist, Sir
William Muir (1819–1905) and the English writer, HG Wells (1866–1946).23 It is
true that a few writers, such as the Marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794), Johann
von Goethe (1749–1832) and Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), had favourable
things to say about Islam and its Prophet, but this was a small group.
The Ottomans mostly won their military confrontations with Europe in the
16th to mid-17th centuries. They did lose the naval battle of Lepanto in 1571 to
the Holy League, but respective victories over Spain in 1574, Portugal in 1578
and Venice in 1669 gained them Tunis, Fez (Morocco) and Crete. They almost
lost central Hungary and Romania to the Austrians in the war of 1593–1606 but
ultimately prevailed. Yet, in the Peace Treaty of Zsitvatorok (1606), the
Ottomans acknowledged the leader of Austria as Kaiser, a significant symbolic
concession of equality that hitherto had only been granted to Elizabeth I of
England and Francis I of France.
For 42 years between 1683 and 1792, the Ottoman Empire lost wars with the
Holy League (a coalition involving the Vatican, the Holy Roman Empire and
Venice), Austria and Russia. Disastrous as these defeats were (the Empire lost
Hungary, Transylvania, Bukovina, the Banat of Temisvar, Bessarabia, Podolia
and the Crimea), also momentous was the Porte’s coerced recognition of
Austria’s and Russia’s right to intervene legally on behalf of the Christian
552
 ISLAM AND THE WEST IN WORLD HISTORY

subjects of the Empire, rights that had been granted already to other European
powers.24
To stem the tide, the Empire sent officials to Europe to learn the secret
of European power. Beyond Europe’s dismissive attitude, the ideas that these
individuals brought back with them were so alien to the Ottoman rulers that, with
the exception of a superficial imitation of European dress, garden parties and
horticulture, they had little impact until the 19th century. European writers such
as Montesquieu and Voltaire wrote imaginative stories of exotically dressed
Muslims with strange habits travelling to Europe in order to report back on what
they saw. Composers, artists and writers, such as Mozart, Rossini, Delacroix,
Ingres, Byron and Fitzgerald, depicted Muslims in fantastic stories of harems,
repressive rulers and flying carpets.

The Islamic world and the West in the modern period

The French revolution occasioned the introduction of European political ideas to
Muslim countries. Partly this was because of the spread of communications and
intensification of European travel to these areas. But, it was also a result of
European military and political intervention. Finally, Muslim rulers had become
more convinced that reforms based on Western patterns could ensure their
societies’ survival without losing their cultural identity. The European powers
pressed the Ottoman, Iranian and Mughal governments to modernise their
societies and political systems so they could more efficiently impose their
colonial control there.
The conservative clergy resisted these reforms, arguing that they would be
tantamount to the undoing of the shari’a (holy law) itself. This would mean that
Muslims could not follow the law and hence would be unable to execute God’s
commands, which in turn would cause Muslims to enter into a state of unbelief.
By contrast, reformist-minded clergy were prepared to experiment with notions
of constitutionalism and parliamentary institutions by concentrating on those
aspects of the tradition that emphasised equality and commended holding rulers
to account for their conduct. Additionally, they invoked sayings attributed to the
Prophet such as that Muslims must not obey a creature against their Creator
(meaning no ruler could command impious acts); and in Qur’an 3:159 and
42:38—verses enjoining the principle of consultation in affairs.
The great reform movement of Islam known as the salafiyya (literally, return to
the model of the ancestors) during the years 1880–1935 was open to a dialogue
with the West, but within limits.25 The leaders of this movement, including Jamal
al-Din al-Afghani (d 1897), Muhammad ’Abduh, Grand Mufti of Egypt (d 1905)
and ’Abduh’s student, Rashid Rida’ (d 1935) all agreed that Islam had nothing
to fear from science. They also emphasised the importance of independent
judgment [ijtihad] by jurists to determine legal rules of behaviour for circum-
stances where the traditional sources were silent. This doctrine had long been
dormant in the Sunni Muslim world, although in Shi’ism it had been vindicated
already in the late 1700s. During the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of
1905–09, for example, the constitutionalist clergy innovatively resorted to ijtihad
to activate the Islamic social doctrine of accountability through the supervision
553
 SHAHROUGH AKHAVI

of public morals (hisba) as a way to limit the political power of the monarch.
’Abduh and Rida’ emphasised through ijtihad that rulers have imprescriptible
responsibilities to the believers. For one thing, the Qur’an itself (5:1) stipulates
that the believers must ‘fulfil contracts’. Salafi thinkers believed that the theorists
of the caliphate, such as al-Baghdadi (d 1037), al-Mawardi (d 1058), al-Ghazali
(d 1111), and ibn Jama’ah (d 1313), had established that the caliph and the
believers maintained mutually contractual relations. Therefore, Muslim
modernists could find a retroactive authorisation in the Qur’an for parliaments
and modern constitutions, invoking the sacred text itself on behalf of a variant of
social contract theory that most observers in the West relate to Hobbes, Locke,
Rousseau, Kant and Ferguson.
However, there are limits to how far even modernists could go in dialogue with
the West. After all, the Western states had inflicted devastating territorial defeats
on the Muslims, championed the breakaway rebellions of the non-Muslim
nationalities against the Ottoman Empire, drawn up secret treaties in World War I
that betrayed their promises of independence to the Arabs, and supported the
Zionist movement to convert Palestine into a Jewish state.26
Despite Western hegemony in the Middle East in the interwar period, the
various Western political models—liberal, fascist and Marxist—all failed.
Fascism’s failure can be explained largely by the episodic nature of Italian efforts
to control their zones of influence (mainly Libya and Somalia). Marxism’s failure
reverts to its identification with atheism and a foreign power, the USSR. As for
liberalism, despite its association with colonialism, aspects of liberalism could be
accommodated in an Islamic Weltanschauung. Liberalism’s roots in capitalism
are in principle not an obstacle to the acceptance of parts of the model’s
economic features in Islamic societies.27 Nor are observers such as Samuel
Huntington and Daniel Pipes convincing in claiming that ‘Islam’ is inherently
anti-democratic. For democracy features a number of elements that are not absent
in Islamic history and traditions.28 As Talmon,29 Arendt30 and others have often
noted, equality and justice are critical values of the French revolutionaries and
later democrats. Equality of believers is a central value in the Islamic tradition,
even though the actual political and economic equality of all individuals in the
social order has proven elusive.
Instead, it is proprietary individualism that underpins the difficulty modernist
Muslims have with liberal democracy. Note that is it not individualism per se that
is problematical. Even the most dedicated Muslim communitarians today are
perfectly content to allocate an arena of life in which the individual may express
herself or himself. Instead, the problem seems to be what CB MacPherson
has called ‘the political theory of possessive individualism’ that is endemic to
mainstream liberal thought. In MacPherson’s view, possessive individualism is at
the heart of liberalism, with roots extending back to Hobbes (1588–1679) and
Locke (1632–1704). To MacPherson, the flaw in liberalism is that it ultimately
treats the individual
as essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to
society for them. The individual was seen neither as a moral whole, nor as part of a
larger social whole, but as an owner of himself. The relation of ownership, having
become for more and more men the critically important relation determining their

554
 ISLAM AND THE WEST IN WORLD HISTORY

actual freedom and actual prospect of realizing their full potentialities, was read
back into the nature of the individual. The individual, it was thought, is free
inasmuch as he is proprietor of his person and capacities. The human essence is
freedom from dependence on the wills of others, and freedom is a function of
possession. Society becomes a lot of free equal individuals related to each other as
proprietors of their own capacities and of what they have acquired by their exercise.
Society consists of relations of exchange between proprietors. Political society
becomes a calculated device for the protection of this property and for the main-
tenance of an orderly relation of exchange.31
This perspective is far from any Muslim theory of society, including those, such
as that of the modernist Muslim Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938), that emphasise
the self-affirmation of the individual.32 In all Muslim outlooks the arrant indi-
vidualism that MacPherson has described is simply missing. Efforts to establish
liberalism in the Muslim world have been resisted because it conflicts with the
central idea of salvation in Islam, according to which God has placed the human
being on earth as His trustee, whose full potential can be realised only by
membership in a community of believers, a community whose existence and
welfare is warrant for the religious injunctions.33 The individual’s moral worth
is shaped by the contributions of the community of believers, even as that
community is itself shaped by what that individual has to offer it.
Ironically, the British and French glossed their colonial rule over the Muslims
with the rhetoric of liberal democracy, but their policies denied precisely the kind
of outcomes that liberal ideas and institutions are meant to implement. These
powers ensured that the parliaments and constitutions that they imposed on the
Muslims did not lead to the demise of their imperial rule. Electoral laws were
written in such a way as to deny broad enfranchisement. Parliamentary elections
were rigged so that pro-European landlords would be the big winners and sit in
the legislature to enact laws beneficial to the colonial powers. And the pro-
British and pro-French executives in these Muslim societies remained relatively
immune from constitutional restrictions on their pro-European policies. This
situation bred cynicism among Muslim populations regarding Western
democracy. Western states were willing to encourage democracy at home but
sought to prevent real democracy from taking root in Muslim societies.

Evolution of the Muslim experience since World War II

Eventually the European states withdrew, Muslim societies established inde-
pendent states, and various kinds of authoritarian regimes took power. At first,
they enjoyed political legitimacy by the sheer fact of being led by native rulers.
However, their incompetence and despotism sharply narrowed their support.
Losses in wars by Arab states to Israel in 1948–49, 1956, 1967, 1973 and 1982,
American support for Israel and for generally corrupt pro-American Arab
regimes and, above all, the fate of the Palestinians, combined to push Muslims to
‘Islam’ as the solution.
This surprised many observers but, in retrospect, it might have been antici-
pated, given the failures of the Western models as noted earlier. Also, there were
some historical precedents. Shortly before World War I the Ottoman sultan had
555
 SHAHROUGH AKHAVI

raised the banner of pan-Islamism to save his realm. In the late 1920s the Muslim
Brotherhood was created in Egypt to establish the rule of Islamic law and to
expel the British. Eventually, the Brotherhood grew into a social movement with
a large following. It survived its darkest days as an underground organisation
under the rule of Jamal ’Abd-al-Nasir (Nasser, 1954–1970), and Nasser’s
successor, Anwar Sadat (ruled 1970–1981), deliberately cultivated relations with
it in an effort to enhance his popularity. Meanwhile, branches of the Brotherhood
have been established in many Muslim countries, including Sudan, Syria and
Jordan, as well as in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Beginning in the 1970s a variety of groups split off from the parent organisa-
tion in Egypt and pursued violence in the effort to create a society ruled by
Islamic law. One of them assassinated Sadat in 1981. In the Gaza Strip the
organisation known as Hamas (an acronym standing for the Islamic Resistance
Movement) broke away from the Brotherhood in that district. Ironically the
Israelis initially supported this development in an effort to weaken the secular
PLO. In Algeria the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) emerged and was poised to
sweep general elections in 1992 when, to the relief of the USA and France, the
army stepped in. In violent reaction to this development, the Armed Islamic
Group, a splinter of the FIS, has formed and committed many violent acts and
atrocities, and the regime has resorted to oppression and atrocities of its own. In
southern Lebanon, two Shi’i groups, ’Amal and the more militant Hizbullah,
have fought the Israeli soldiers occupying the ‘security zone’ they created after
their invasion of Lebanon in 1982. In Pakistan Harakat al-Mujahidin and Jaysh-i
Muhammad are active, and across the border in Afghanistan a variety of
‘mujahidin’ guerrilla organisations combatted the Soviet occupation of 1979–89
but then fell to quarrelling among themselves until the Taliban regime took over
in the mid-1990s. The Iranian revolution of 1978–79, which overthrew the
monarchy—a client regime of the USA—gave further impetus to many of these
developments.
All these violence-prone Islamist groups hold the ‘minimalist perspective’
identified earlier to be a mortal threat to ‘Islam’. The only way to triumph against
this threat is to support the ‘maximalist perspective’, which means restoring the
integration of religion and politics and making the shari’a the exclusive law of
the land. None of these violence-prone groups shares the tolerance of earlier
Muslims for those of other religions, much less of different Islamic sects.
In retrospect, it was the disastrous June war of 1967 that really launched the
revival of political Islam.34 Some Muslims even argued that the Israelis won
because they had remained faithful to God (the same God of the Muslims) while
the Muslims had chosen secularism. The 1967 war marked the decline of Arab
nationalism under the leadership of Egypt. The argument is not that Arab
nationalism was finished, but that it had been discredited. Apart from the secular
PLO, the rising organisations in the Muslim world since 1967 have been Islamist:
the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Sudan, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank, and
the Gaza Strip; Hizbullah and ’Amal in Lebanon; the Welfare Party and its
successors in Turkey; the Nahdah (better known, ironically, by its French name,
the Tendence) in Tunisia, the FIS and the Armed Islamic Group in Algeria, the
Nahdatul Ulama in Indonesia, the Jama’at-i Islami in Pakistan, and the
556
 ISLAM AND THE WEST IN WORLD HISTORY

Khomeinists in Iran. The names of the prominent political figures in the Muslim
world were no longer the secular nationalists but people such as Bediuzeman
Sa’id Nursi (d. 1960) and Necmettin Erbakan in Turkey, Said al-Hawa’ in Syria,
Rachid el-Ghanouchi in Tunisia, ’Abbasi Madani in Algeria, Muhammad Fadl
Allah in Lebanon, Sayyid Qutb and Muhammad al-Ghazzali in Egypt, Hasan
al-Turabi in Sudan, Ahmad Yasin in the Occupied Territories, Abu al-’Ala
al-Mawdudi in Pakistan, and ’Ali Shari’ati and Ruhullah Khomeini in Iran. All
these individuals strongly opposed the West in various ways, although a few did
so less categorically.
The paradigmatic leaders of the Islamists have been Khomeini, Mawdudi and
Qutb. Khomeini advanced the novel argument in Shi’ite law that the clergy must
rule society until the return of the Hidden Imam, an eschatological figure
believed to have vanished in the late ninth century whose miraculous reappear-
ance as messiah will mark the beginning of true justice in the world. Mawdudi
and Qutb both argued that the language in certain verses in the Qur’an (5:44,
5:45, 5:47, 12:40 and 12:6735—dubbed the ‘sovereignty verses’) had been mis-
interpreted by earlier commentators and jurists. They focused on the root h-k-m,
both in its verbal noun form as hukm and in its third person plural form yahkumu
to maintain that these words did not mean ‘judgement’ or ‘they judge’ but rather
‘rule’ and ‘they rule’. All three determined that any modern day ruler of an
Islamic society who failed to ‘rule’ according to Allah’s revelation was an
unbeliever and hence could legitimately be resisted.
The more radical followers of Qutb, whom Nasser’s regime executed in 1966
for revolutionary activities, assassinated Sadat in 1981 and occasionally launched
attacks on tourists and police on these grounds. Mawdudi died in 1979, two years
into the rule of Pakistani President Zia al-Haqq, who expended great efforts to
persuade his people that he was a legitimate Muslim ruler, a claim rejected by
Mawdudi. Khomeini came to power in Iran in 1979 and ruled for 10 years under
the new rubric of the Faqih (Jurist) of the Islamic Republic. Relations with the
USA were broken when, in October 1979, after Washington invited the Shah to
the USA for treatment of his cancer (a step widely believed in Iran to be a
prelude to the restoration of the Shah in the same way that the USA had restored
him in 1953), students in November overran the US embassy in Tehran and
captured its diplomats, and a rescue mission in April 1980 failed. Relations
entered a deep freeze for many years, with Tehran accusing the USA of trying to
undo the results of the revolution, seeking to impose its hegemony over Iran and
the region, and underwriting Israel’s domination of the Arabs and Muslims of the
Middle East. For its part the USA blamed Iran for encouraging terrorism,
opposing peace between Israel and its Arab neighbours, and for clerical
absolutism. Although Khomeini and, after his death in 1989, his successors, tried
to downplay the Shi’ite Muslim aspects of Iranian politics and foreign policy,
ultimately the differences between Sunnism and Shi’ism proved too great an
obstacle to their being generally accepted as the acknowledged leaders of the
Islamist revival.
Meanwhile, admirers of Qutb and Mawdudi, such as the Egyptian Shaykh
’Umar ’Abd al-Rahman and the Saudi expatriate businessman, Osama Bin
Laden, gained notoriety. The supporters of the former, who had fled Egypt to
557
 SHAHROUGH AKHAVI

escape arrest, set off explosives at the World Trade Center in New York in 1993.
Bin Laden, who had offended the Saudi government by attacking the corruption
and authoritarian rule of the ruling house, as well as its willingness to allow the
US government to establish a base in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf crisis of
1990–91, escaped from Saudi Arabia and established himself eventually in
Afghanistan. There he funded the training of Algerian, Sudanese and other
militant Islamists and openly spoke of his intent to kill Americans in the Middle
East. His supporters’ most dramatic act was to fly aeroplanes into the World
Trade Center buildings and the Pentagon in September 2001, which precipitated
the US bombing of Afghanistan and the overthrow of the Taliban regime there.
However, this kind of antipathy is not endorsed by the overwhelming majority
of Muslims in the world. Even in areas where violence-prone political Islam has
earlier been strong, it is in retreat. For example, developments in Iran since 1997
have favoured a change in tone and perhaps eventually in substance in regard
to the relationship between that government and the West. This began with the
presidential elections of May 1997, which were won by Muhammad Khatami, a
former Minister of Culture who had been removed for his liberal policies,
and who campaigned for the presidency on themes of reform, civil society,
democracy and criticism of global capitalism. Then, in February 2000, parlia-
mentary elections were won overwhelmingly by pro-Khatami candidates, with
significant implications for altering the hostility in mutual relations. In Yemen
since 1994 the trends have also seemed potentially significant, as a movement
has swept society there that is basically anti-authoritarian. In Jordan and Kuwait,
tentatively but noticeably, social movements are taking root that no longer accept
the old clichés from rulers that stability is necessary above any immediate desires
on the part of the population for greater autonomy from the state.36 The deaths of
Jordan’s King Hussein and Morocco’s King Hasan, authoritarian rulers who had
ruled their countries for decades, provide opportunities for a loosening up of
politics in these countries.

Conclusions
It is telling that during periods of exuberance and confidence, Muslims have
lived peaceably alongside non-Muslims and creatively interacted with them to
their mutual benefit. Thus, in the eighth and ninth centuries, Western thought
played an important role in the development of Islamic philosophy, just as that
philosophy itself was to be influential in Western thinking a few hundred years
later. A similar situation of coexistence was to develop in the Cordoba caliphate
in Spain during the period 711–1236, a time that both the Muslim and non-
Muslim peoples of the Iberian Peninsula in those centuries considered a golden
age of tolerance. Intriguingly, the Muslims of Spain were apparently able to
persist in their feelings of toleration for the people of other religions during the
era of the Crusades in the Muslim East (1090s–1290s). Not surprisingly, this was
less the case for the Muslims of Syria, Palestine and Egypt, where many of the
battles of the Crusades were fought. Under siege by the enemy, these Muslims
understandably developed enmity towards their military foes, and this enmity
could not be restrained from spilling over into the realm of Muslim intellectual
558
 ISLAM AND THE WEST IN WORLD HISTORY

writings about the West.

A comparable dialectic of confidence/tolerance may be seen in the period of
the Ottoman Empire in its heyday (1453–1683), although in this case Muslim
tolerance towards Westerners in the Ottoman era was to extend even well in to
the period of Ottoman decline (1683–1923). In fact, even in the period since
1967, where hostility shown toward the West by the most radical of the Islamist
groups has been at a peak, their leaders have been guarded in their conduct
toward the West. If the ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis is correct, then how is it that
Ayat Allah Khomeini, for instance, never called for a jihad against the West?37
Indeed, Khomeini presided over a political system whose institutional features
include certain classic Western forms, such as a constitution with references to
national sovereignty, a presidential system, electoral laws specifying periodic
elections, and separation of powers.
In other words, today’s criticism of the West in the Muslim world, frequently
accompanied by a rejection of Western secular culture, seems to be positively
correlated with the Muslims’ sense of weakness and vulnerability in the face
of powerful Western states and economic domination. This suggests that if the
relationship between the Muslim and Western worlds were to become more equal
in the future, Muslim rejectionism could be expected to be transformed into more
tolerant attitudes and behaviour. The bitterness toward the West associated with
the most radical Islamist movements in the 1980s and 1990s should be seen in
the historical context of their era. Historical circumstances, by their nature, are
not constant but, rather, variable.
There is nothing automatic about recent modest trends towards pluralism in the
Muslim world. Much will depend on developments in regard to Palestine and
Kashmir, for example, and on Washington’s willingness to question its tendency
to support leaders in the Islamic world disliked by their own people (as in Saudi
Arabia or Indonesia under Suharto). It will also be contingent upon the ability
of non-violent Islamist groups to repudiate the coercive behaviour of those
movements and organisations that do rely on force. Moreover, it is likely that,
even if pluralist trends are not suppressed and in some cases allow movements
based on them to take power, they will not result in systems rooted in proprietary
liberal democracy (ie Western models). This is because of the West’s devaluation
of the individual as a moral being in favour of the individual as a proprietor of
him- or herself.
Meanwhile, those who maintain that Islam and democracy are incompatible are
unconvincing. Indeed, depending on actual political developments, prospects
exist for an increasing valorisation in the Muslim world of trends all democrats
value: contestation of spaces, multiplicity of interpretations, indeterminacy and
contingency of positions, and non-finality of solutions. Democracy can grow
under these conditions, but it will be institutionally different from the West-
minster model. This difference, far from being fatal for the relationship between
Islam and the West, would be liberating for both. After all, there have been
periods, as we have seen, where relations between the two have been stable and
informed by understanding and tolerance.

559
 SHAHROUGH AKHAVI

Notes
1
Such as Daniel Pipes & John Emerson, for example. See Abd al-Wahhab al-Affandy, ‘Terrorism by
any other name’, Middle East International, 615, 24 December 1999, pp 25–27.
2
Samuel P Huntington, ‘The clash of civilizations?’, Foreign Affairs, 72 (3), 1993, pp 22–49. It was
later developed into a book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York:
Simon and Shuster, 1996. Note that the question mark in the journal article title has disappeared in the
book title.
3
The argument, in my opinion, is flimsy and tendentious. Harvard historian Roy Mottahedeh—a
colleague of Huntington—has put paid to the ‘clash’ thesis on both theoretical and empirical grounds
in his scintillating essay, ‘The clash of civilizations: an Islamicist’s critique’, Harvard Middle Eastern
and Islamic Review, 2, 1996, pp 1–26.
4
These are definitions three and five under the entry, ‘Religion’, Oxford English Dictionary, Vol XIII,
New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, pp 568–569.
5
Muslims adhering to this view never tire of declaring that ‘islam din wa dawla’ (‘Islam is [both]
religion and state’).
6
I am aware that posing matters in terms of ‘minimalist’ and ‘maximalist’ views risks constructing
misplaced polarities. Nonetheless, for the purposes of developing the argument at this juncture, I will
put the analysis in the form of a dichotomy.
7
Since law is the queen of the Islamic sciences and ‘trumps’ theology, ‘orthodox’ seems inappropriate
usage here because it denotes a church-sanctioned creed. In Islam, creeds lack the sanction of a synod
or curia. Hence, ‘Muslims are more concerned with right conduct or orthopraxy, rather than with right
belief [orthodoxy]’. The word ‘mainstream’ seems more apposite and is utilised here as a synonym
for ‘Sunni’, which relates to a pre-Islamic root meaning a well trodden path. In early Islam, ‘Sunni’
referred to the exemplary model of the Prophet’s thoughts and deeds—his Sunna. Upon the consolida-
tion of the Islamic community in the ‘Abbasid caliphate (749/50-1258), the Sunnis came to be
identified as those adhering to the well established and articulated way. Sunnis believed that either
sectarian or Sufi (mystical) movements were marginal and unworthy to be followed. The citation is
from W Montgomery Watt, Islamic Creeds: A Selection, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
1994, p 34.
8
The emphasis upon the consensus of the members of the community as to what is best for it is
associated with the Sunni perspective and contrasts with the Shi’i view, which emphasises that the
community’s welfare depends upon the knowledge of immaculate, inerrant and charismatic indi-
viduals—Imams—deemed the ‘proofs’ of God’s existence.
9
Herbert J Liebesny, The Law of the Near and Middle East, Albany, NY: State University of New
York Press, 1975, pp 3–4.
10
W Montgomery Watt, Islamic Philosophy and Theology: An Extended Survey, 2nd ed. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1985, pp 29–30, 41–42; and Watt, Muslim–Christian Encounters, New
York: Routledge, 1991, pp 52–53.
11
‘Islamist’ is a neologism in English, although the use of its equivalent in the Arabic plural—al-
islamiyyun—goes back to the mediaeval thinker, Abu al-Hasan al-Ash’ari (873/74-935/36), who used
it as a way of objectifying Muslim beliefs in an action sphere of reference. In doing so, he was
suggesting that many Muslims had left off being actively engaged in promoting the faith and had
become passive bystanders for whom the divine injunctions to call people to the true faith had become
emptied of any requirement to exert themselves for the sake of God.
12
Marshall GS Hodgson, The Classical Age of Islam, Vol I of the trilogy The Venture of Islam, Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, 1974, p 235.
13
The disputes between the Mu’tazilites and the Ash’arites are summarised well in W Montgomery
Watt, The Formative Period of Islamic Thought, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1973,
pp 209–250, 303–318; and Watt, Islamic Philosophy and Theology, pp 46–55, 64–68.
14
To be sure, Muslim philosophers remained peripheral in the development of Muslim thinking more
generally speaking. Thus, their important impact on Western thought remains one of the great ironies
in the relationship between the Muslim and Western worlds. As Watt puts it:
Through the great philosophers writing in Arabic, notably Avicenna or Ibn Sina (d 1037) and Averroes or Ibn
Rushd (d 1198), Islamic civilization made a significant contribution to the development of philosophy in the
Western world; and this might lead those unfamiliar with that civilization to suppose that the philosophical
movement was a prominent part of the stream of Islamic thought. Yet this is far from being the case. The truth is
rather that the Falasifa [Muslim philosophers] were never part of the main stream but at most an unimportant
side channel—that is, unimportant for the great majority of Muslims.
Watt, Formative Period, p 204.
15
Among the classic works on Islamic philosophy are EIJ Rosenthal, Political Thought in Medieval
Islam, London: Cambridge University Press, 1958; and Muhsin Mahdi, Ibn Khaldun’s Philosophy of
History, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1957.

560
 ISLAM AND THE WEST IN WORLD HISTORY

16
Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West, New York: Oxford University Press, 1993, pp 12–13.
17
Ibn Taymiyya strove to eliminate the common practice on the part of the Muslim clergy of blind
imitation of preceding generations of jurists. He advocated in place of such blind imitation a
reverence of the practice of the Prophet, maintaining that later Muslims had deviated from the
Prophet’s teachings and had been guilty of superstitions and cultic practices that had no place in
Islam. But ibn Taymiyya was hardly a spokesman for rationalism and especially attacked the
philosophers’ claim that they could acquire knowledge of God by rational means. Indeed, he is the
principal jurist invoked by militant Islamist groups in the past 30 years when they condemn the rulers
of their societies for being infidels. In this, they base themselves on ibn Taymiyya’s famous fatwa
(authoritative opinion) condemning the Mongols for being unbelievers, even though they had
officially embraced Islam.
18
Bernard Lewis, The Arabs in History, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960, p 48.
19
Christian efforts to oust Muslim power from the Iberian peninsula began as early as 718, but these
were unsystematic. The aggressive spirit behind the anti-Muslim campaign known as the Reconquista
began to take hold in the 11th century. Muslims in Grenada held on until the Spanish Inquisition
(1490s), a phenomenon that spelled disaster for Jews as well as Muslims.
20
James Piscatori, Islam in a World of Nation States, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986,
p 50ff.
21
Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, London: Oxford University Press, 1961, p 50.
22
Voltaire was of two minds about the Prophet. He sometimes termed him a fanatic but at other times
spoke in praise of his wisdom and tolerance.
23
The epithets levelled at Muhammad included such things as ‘false prophet’, ‘hypocrite’, ‘fanatic’,
‘cut-throat’, ‘demoniac’, ‘lecher’, and ‘enemy of Civilization, Liberty, and the Truth’. Wells went as
far as to assert that the Prophet had been a man of ‘shifty character’, characterised by ‘vanity’,
‘greed’, ‘cunning’ and ‘insincere religious passion’. And he described the Qur’an as ‘certainly
unworthy of its Divine authorship’. See James Piscatori, ‘The Rushdie affair and the politics of
ambiguity’, International Affairs, 66 (4), pp 767–768. See also Norman Daniel, Islam and the West:
The Making of an Image, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1960. Some writers, such as Henri
de Comte de Saint Saire Boulainvilliers (1658–1722) wrote positively of the Prophet as ‘a rational,
incomparable statesman and legislator superior to all those produced by ancient Greece’ and approv-
ingly noted that Islam was not a religion of mystery that might defy reason. Lewis, Islam and the
West, p 90. For a probing of the significance of the basically negative image held by European
thinkers for an understanding of Islam, see the polemical but scholarly work of Edward Said,
Orientalism, New York: Vintage Books, 1978. Among Said’s list of distorters of Islam and Middle
Easterners who have not yet been mentioned are Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), Joseph-Arthur
Comte de Gobineau (1816–1882), Wilhelm von Humboldt (1765–1835), Heymann Steinthal
(1801–1852), Eugene Burnouf (1823–1899), Jean Pierre Abel Remusat (1788–1832), Edward Henry
Palmer (1840–1882), Gustav Weil (1808–1889) and Reinhart Dozy (1820–1893).
24
These are the famous ‘capitulatory rights’ or ‘capitulations’. The term comes from the ‘chapters’ of
treaties and conventions signed by the Ottomans with European governments and Renaissance city
states as early as the 14th century. In the beginning these rights were magnanimously granted by
powerful sultans to European supplicants appealing for the right to trade on the lands of the Empire.
Later, they became modified to include exemptions from certain taxes; still later, they became
converted into rights to speak on behalf of certain minorities; and finally, they became licences for
outright intervention in the political affairs of the Empire. Capitulations were granted as follows:
Genoa, 1352; Venice, 1384/87; Naples, 1498; Poland, 1553; France, 1569; Britain, 1580; Netherlands,
1612; Austria, 1699; Sweden, 1737; Sicily, 1740; Denmark, 1756; Prussia, 1761; Russia, 1774; Spain,
1783. See Halil Inalcik & Donald Quataert (eds), An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman
Empire, 1300–1914, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp 192–195.
25
On the salafiyya reform movement, see Charles C Adams, Islam and Modernism in Egypt, London:
Oxford University Press, 1933; Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, London: Oxford
University Press, 1961; and Malcolm Kerr, Islamic Reform, Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 1966.
26
The following list identifies territorial losses to European powers or derogations of influence as a
consequence of European intervention in the Ottoman Empire and Iran since 1792 (includes break-
away nationalist movements supported by the European states): Georgia, 1810; Bessarabia, 1812;
Greece, 1827; Algeria, 1830; Alden, 1839; Cyprus, 1878; Bosnia Herzegovina, 1878; Serbia, 1878;
Romania, 1878; Montenegro, 1878; Tunisia, 1881; Egypt, 1882; Persian Gulf Sheykhdoms,
1880s–1890s; Mauritania, 1904; Bulgaria, 1908; Libya, 1911; Morocco, 1912; Palestine, 1917; Syria,
1920; Lebanon, 1920; Iraq, 1920; Jordan 1921.
27
See the important book by Maxime Rodinson, Islam and Capitalism, Austin, TX: University of Texas
Press, 1976. Rodinson maintains that there is nothing in Islamic traditions and institutions to prevent

561
 SHAHROUGH AKHAVI

the establishment of an effectively operating capitalist economic system.

28
Even the critical Orientalist scholar, Bernard Lewis, has declared that one ‘can discern elements in
Islamic law and tradition that could assist the development of one or another form of democracy’ and
notes that ‘Islamic tradition strongly disapproves of arbitrary rule’. See Lewis, ‘A historical
overview’, Journal of Democracy, 7 (2), 1996, p 55.
29
Jacob L Talmon, Totalitarianism, New York: Beacon Press, 1952, pp 1–11.
30
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, New York: Viking Press, 1963, pp 39–40. She notes:
There is no period in history to which the Declaration of the Rights of Man [of 1789] could have harkened back.
Former centuries might have recognized that men were equal with respect to God or the gods, for this recog-
nition is not Christian but Roman in origin; Roman slaves could be full-fledged members of religious corpora-
tions and, within the limits of sacred law, their legal status was the same as that of the free man. But inalienable
political rights of all men by virtue of birth would have appeared to all ages prior to [the French revolution] is …
a contradiction in terms.
31
Crawford B MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke,
London: Oxford University Press, 1964, p 3.
32
Muhammad Iqbal, both a poet and a philosopher, was an Indian Muslim known for his assertion of an
activist ethos, in contrast to a fatalistic and passive perspective. He had little patience with Islamic
mysticism because of his view that mysticism encouraged passivity and introspection. He purported to
find that Islamic traditions encouraged creative self-affirmation. There is little doubt that Iqbal was
influenced in his thought by contemporary European thinkers, and in this context this meant Friedrich
Nietzsche. However, it would be a mistake to conclude that Iqbal was a Nietzschean pure and simple.
Paradoxically, he believed that self-affirmation and self-realisation could be achieved mainly by
adherence to ideals of brotherhood and belonging, and even self-sacrifice after the idealised model of
the Prophet. See, for example, his The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, London: Oxford
University Press, 1934; and The Secrets of the Self, trans RA Nicholson, London: Macmillan, 1920.
33
What I have discussed is the Sunni perspective of Islam, which emphasises the charisma of the
community of believers as the basis for belief in the finality of the Islamic message. Shi’i Muslims
emphasise the charisma of the Imams, instead, because of their understanding that ordinary Muslims
are too ignorant to be aware of what God’s law is.
34
Political Islam is a term that has been used interchangeably with a variety of others, including ‘Islamic
fundamentalism’ and ‘Islamism’. The central idea is the sharpened political consciousness of the
believer in regard to the integration of religion and politics in Islam; and the demand to replace
existing legal arrangements in Muslim societies—systems that are hybrids of Islamic personal status
and aspects of Islamic criminal law and Western penal, commercial, labour, financial and constitu-
tional law—with the holy law. Islamist movements are not necessarily violence-prone, although they
may be so. See also footnote 11. The following are among the better works on ‘political Islam’: Said
Arjomand, The Turban for the Crown, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988; François Burgat &
William Dowell, eds, The Islamic Movement in North Africa, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press,
1997; Dale Eickelman & James Piscatori, Muslim Politics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1996; JJG Jansen, The Neglected Duty, New York: Macmillan, 1986; Serif Mardin, Religion and
Social Change in Modern Turkey, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989; Henry
Munson, Jr, Islam and Revolution in the Middle East, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988;
Jammes Piscatori, ed, Islamic Fundamentalisms and the Gulf Crisis, Chicago, IL: American Academy
of Arts and Sciences, 1991; Olivier Roy, Islam and Resistance in Afghanistan, New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1986; Bruce Lawrence, Shattering the Myth: Islam Beyond Violence, Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1998; Emmanuel Sivan, Radical Islam, New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1990; and Sami Zubaida, Islam, The People and the State, London: IB Tauris, 1993.
35
The relevant portions of 5:44, 5:45 and 5:47 had traditionally been interpreted as follows: ‘those who
do not judge according to Allah’s revelation are unbelievers’; ‘those who do not judge according to
Allah’s revelation are oppressors’; ‘those who do not judge according to Allah’s revelation are
evil doers’. Similarly, the relevant parts of 12:40 and 12:67 had been traditionally interpreted as:
‘judgment belongs to Allah alone’ (the language is the same in the two verses). Intriguingly, much
of Khomeini’s argument also focuses on the triliteral root, h-k-m, this time identifying the active
participal form, hakim. He maintained that the traditional rendering of this word as arbitrator or judge
was wrong and that it should be understood to mean ruler. It should be noted that the root,
h-k-m, has both the meaning of judging, arbitrating, judgement, arbitration, etc, and ruling, exercising
authority, rule, rulership.
36
For some of these trends, see John Esposito & John Voll, Islam and Democracy, New York: Oxford
University Press, 1996; and Augustus R Norton (ed), Civil Society in the Middle East, two vols,
Leiden: EJ Brill, 1995, 1996.
37
To my knowledge, the only militant Islamist to have done so is Osama bin Laden, who is not qualified
to issue such a verdict since he is not a jurist.

562